Of owning and being owned
Jade Angeles Fitton writes about Devon as part of our series 'There's a street in my neighbourhood', which has taken us so far from Suffolk to Minneapolis
I’m relatively new here, and have been eager to inform anyone I bump into on The Loop that I’m from Devon. Depending on how long we talk, I’ll inform them that one side of my family has always been ‘here’. By ‘here’ I mean ‘Devon and Cornwall’.
The Loop is a 1.6 mile circuit that looks a bit like a fox head on a map. Almost every day for nearly four years, I’ve walked this circuit. To the uninitiated, The Loop might appear like an anonymous country lane with high hedgerows and deep potholes: nothing to speak of. But, like more inhabited places, it has its sights.
Within one of the fox’s ears, there is a field with a 300 year old oak, where the buzzards eat their kill and, at dusk, call to one another to roost. Just up from patches of comfrey, lungwort and honesty, there’s the old potter’s; his hand-built kiln chimney a turret in the sky. Someone told me David Attenborough buys his wares there. All I know is that if Attenborough does buy their teapots, he is paying £450.
At the bottom of the stream that cuts through the circuit is a wood where roe deer hide. There’s the limb-like beech where great spotted woodpeckers nest. On the opposite side of The Loop, the stream reappears from beneath a drystone bridge, where damselflies rally in summer. As the road rises towards our hamlet, there are vole runs and patches of violets, in March, sitting in the moss. They were once packed in boxes and were sent to London in boxes marked ‘Devon Violets’.
A man who retired to The Loop from Brighton said, ‘There’s a lot of miserable old bastards round here.’ But there are lovely people too. When my favourite farmer does his rounds he always asks about my writing, and I always ask about his farm. When I bumped into him late last year, he had an open wound after slipping and getting trodden on by a heifer during artificial insemination. I had been writing a book proposal for almost a year and gave him an idea of what that constituted. We both agreed we would rather not do the other’s job.
I don’t particularly like that I felt the need to profess that I’m from ‘here’, from the other side of the river Ted Hughes used to fish on. I suppose it was a means of assuring others that I belong here, long before I felt any specific sense of belonging beyond it being my home county. Until I read Alan Garner’s The Voice That Thunders, I’d never really been cognisant of ‘belonging’ anywhere. Of his landscape at Alderley Edge, he writes, ‘It was imperative that I should know my place. That can be achieved only by inheriting one’s childhood landscape, and by growing in it to maturity. It is a subtle matter of owning and being owned.’
A sense of belonging can be derived through myriad things, but an ancestral connection to a place (however tenuous), that’s something particular, a little backward, maybe. It can blinker me from The Loop’s messier side: the blue van that collects the farms’ dead, emanating a smell one can only pray not to taste. The odd almost-empty bright pink crumpled can of ‘Monster’, and agricultural runoff. The screaming of cows. Sometimes hedgerows are trimmed to a buzz cut – sometimes it happens during nesting season. Sometimes entire hedgerows are ripped out. There’s the half mile-long green line of slurry on the top road in winter. Though I might sometimes overlook it, I know it all. It’s all part of where I live.
Unlike Alderley Edge, The Loop has no Neolithic sites, no folklore. It’s just a place where things live and die. But it’s because I know where the wild garlic will be in spring that I feel like I’m home, like I belong here. Sometimes I’ll walk The Loop until the first stars come out. There’ll be a crescent moon above the farm on the hill and Jupiter rising by the silo, and I’ll feel like Garner, in that, ‘If I have any real occupation, it is to be here.’
Jades Angels Fitton’s first book, Hermit, was published to much acclaim in 2023. She has just finished reading Patrick Galbraith’s Uncommon Ground.
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